


there will be no despair under this frozen sky

by sannlykke



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Humor, Fairy Tale Elements, Fluff and Humor, Gen, M/M, Other, Various cameos of other characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-08-29 16:04:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8496475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sannlykke/pseuds/sannlykke
Summary: To: Mayuzumi Chihiro
5 Phantom Lane
9992 Middle-of-Nowhere
The Arctic  WARNING: FRAGILE, KEEP UPRIGHT
NO RETURNS"...Why the hell did someone send me a kid?!"





	1. 立冬

**Author's Note:**

> this is a series of stories about snow fairy mayuzumi (who...farms...and writes shitty erotica for a living) and accidental mail-order psychic kid kuroko going on wonderful wacky adventures in the arctic.
> 
> also known as "what the fuck am i doing writing another series of semi-interconnected au ficlets vaguely based off another obscure chinese novel?" and i mean semi-interconnected as in someone who is technically dead in one chapter may be alive in another one! this may or may not be important because continuity unfortunately exists only intermittently in the north pole. can't do anything about that, sorry.
> 
> the tagged ships are present, but the story will focus on/be from mayuzumi & kuroko's (and occasionally takao's) perspectives, which is why i haven't tagged any other characters yet bc lol there's too many.
> 
> oh, and please don't send children in the post. that's illegal.

Takao Kazunari bends down to examine his first assignment of the week, tapping on the side of the box before straightening up again. “You want me to deliver this to _where_?”

“Well, we don’t really get stuff like this often,” Otsubo admits, peeling off his mittens at his desk. There’s a framed photo with a frilly crocheted covering sitting next to his computer, with the rest of the available space drowning in paperwork. He sighs, thumbing through a stack directly in front of him. “It was left in the doorway this morning. Miyaji’s taken the week off, so you’ll have some extra weight—but you’ll get to have a feel of the town this way, won’t you?”

“Sure,” Takao replies brightly, grabbing his cap from the door. “I’ll be back in no time, sir.”

 

 

 

Several things Mayuzumi anticipates for his mornings: a cup of coffee (very strong), checking his emails for new orders, and spending the rest of that morning typing away at his desk.

This morning, however, there’s an unanticipated knock on the door. “Hey, you’ve got mail!”

Mayuzumi frowns.

Usually it takes a while for Amazon orders to get to him. Clearing customs is a pain when you’re living in the middle of abso-fucking-lutely nowhere, and it’s not like he can use his snow fairy powers on same-day shipping. He slides off his chair somewhat unwillingly, but soon his curiosity overpowers any suspicion.

Mayuzumi opens the door to a youngish mailman with a large box in tow. He can immediately tell this man is new by the fact that he’s actually _smiling_. Nobody smiles at him, not here. Not ever, actually.

“…”

“Hi! Can you sign this here—Mayuzumi Chihiro, right? Bit chillier than usual out here today, isn’t it?”

“I don’t remember ordering anything this big,” Mayuzumi replies, ignoring the greeting. His frown deepens at the box—there is no return address. “…Don’t blow-up dolls usually come in smaller boxes?”

“Dolls?” The mailman looks at the box, perplexed. His name-tag reads _Takao Kazunari_. “Is that what you call children nowadays? Didn’t know snowmen were in the business of adopting, but what do I know.”

“Wh—“

“You done signing yet? I still gotta take those packages up that mountain.” He takes Mayuzumi’s hand, the one with the pen, and presses it to the screen lightly. “Alright, remember! Kids aren’t like hamsters, you can’t keep them in a box forever.”

Mayuzumi stares as Takao heads off towards his sled. One of the reindeer sneezes at him, and then they are off.

“…I must’ve heard wrong.”

He kicks the door open wider, and the box—not something he wants to carry, what with his coffee still in his other hand—glides indoors smoothly with another nudge. It settles on the worn carpet next to his kitchen table and emits a soft cry.

_…What._

“What the hell,” Mayuzumi growls,, leaning forward to pry the top open. A pair of blue eyes stare back at him from inside the box littered with wrappers and empty bottled milkshakes. _This is not happening_.

“… _Why_ the hell did someone send me a kid?”

 

 

 

“I’m Kuroko Tetsuya.”

“And I don’t care.”

The kid can’t be more than ten years old. It’s a little surprising it took him this long to say anything, but that had just been all the better for Mayuzumi. He clicked out of the page, having finally exhausted his past orders list, and still he hadn’t found anything resembling an illegal trafficking ring. The house smells like coffee, and faintly of vanilla.

“You didn’t buy me off the Internet,” Kuroko continues, unhelpfully.

Mayuzumi gives him a once-over: messy pale blue hair, an earnest stare, and wearing nothing that matched the weather outside. A thought occurs to him—this must be a prank of some sort, perhaps orchestrated by that damned mailman. “Then _why_ are you here? I sure don’t remember signing any contract that guaranteed me a live child for sacrificial needs. Not…that I need one.”

“My parents sent me.” Kuroko does not look the least bit frightened, and _that_ concerns Mayuzumi just a little bit. Maybe he’s never seen a snow fairy before; most city people haven’t. Although that tells him nothing about why there’s a human kid standing in his room. “To my aunt. I was sleeping most of the time.”

“…Do I look like your aunt to you?”

Kuroko shrugs his thin little shoulders. “I don’t know where she lives.”

Mayuzumi exhales. He’d been meaning to spend today finishing up the draft for _Yeti Fantasies_ that is _quite_ overdue, but it is apparent that is not to be. The mailman would not be back until tomorrow (the phone is out of order all the time at the post office, _and_ the damned mailmen change so often he can’t get their numbers straight. In any case, he does not think calling Takao would be helpful _at all_.) “Alright, fine. You’ll stay on the couch tonight.”

 _And off to your aunt’s tomorrow_ , he adds mentally, though Kuroko is already on said couch in a flash and not paying the least bit of attention to him. Well, whatever. Mayuzumi goes to the kitchen and dumps the coffee dregs into the sink.

 _What kind of parents would send a kid in a box?_ He wonders, but then again, humans are fucking weird.

 

 

 

“What's that crying noise?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He turns off the gas and lifts up the still-bubbling pot of soup. There’s something just a little unsettling about a child who isn’t the least bit afraid of strangers—Kuroko sits at the table without moving, watching Mayuzumi set down bowls and spoons.

…It’s not like he never gets visitors. But as they’re not often of the human variety, Mayuzumi could only make do with what little actual food he has for his…guest. Now that he thinks about it, perhaps he should’ve just made ramen instead. He watches Kuroko sip at his pristine white bowl hesitantly, and then remembers that these had been a gift from Akashi, sent three days ago with a note attached that he'd forgotten _all_ about until now:

> _I think you'll be getting some new visitors soon, Chihiro. Don't you think you should be prepared?_

"What an absolute brat," he mutters to himself, digging his own spoon hard into the mush. Kuroko, for his part, doesn't look up.

 

 

 

The next morning finds Mayuzumi waking up to the smell of boiled eggs.

“Hey! What—“

Kuroko hops off the stool and looks up at him with those innocent (no, definitely _not_ innocent) eyes as Mayuzumi quickly turns off the stove. A quick look in the fridge tells him that’s the rest of his stock. “…Is this why your parents sent you away?”

“No.”

“Okay, fine,” Mayuzumi says. He grabs Kuroko’s hand, pausing only to pluck two eggs out of the water. “Whatever. Eat up, we’re going to the post office in twenty.”

 

 

 

Otsubo looks up from his morning paper and frowns. “Takao, I thought you told me it was a doll.”

“That’s what _he_ told me!”

“Takao…”

“Anyway,” Mayuzumi cuts in, getting increasingly annoyed. “You _should_ have the return address, shouldn’t you? He says he’s supposed to be with his aunt.“

“Give me a moment,” Takao chirps, tapping away at his laptop. A pause. Some more taps. “Actually, we don’t. Weird, huh? Guess you get to keep him?”

“Hell no,” Mayuzumi begins to say, but notices the door swinging shut. _You’ve gotta be kidding me_. “…Is Kasamatsu in today?”

“Should be,” Otsubo says, glancing out the window towards the police station. “Lights are on, but you better go check.”

 

 

 

On first sight, Middle-of-Nowhere is just another tiny village at the snowy, barren edge of the North Pole. A village spread out over approximately five square kilometers, populated by 200-odd humans, faeries and other fantastic creatures unaccounted for in the register the village council has long given up on updating.

Mayuzumi has been here for longer than most, though his personal interactions with the rest of the village are few and far between, for the most part restricted to market day bartering and the post. He doesn’t _hate_ the villagers per se, but they’re annoying enough he doesn’t want to deal with more than he has to. Kuroko’s arrival, however, seems hellbent on changing that.

He—and Takao, walking jauntily behind with a hum on his lips—follows the tiny footprints in the snow to the village police office. It’s more of a shack than an office, really, but upon swinging the door open he feels a strong heat wash over his face. Unpleasant, but what can you do when you’re a snow fairy?

“Whoa,” Takao says, wiping his feet off at the entrance mat. “Neat fireplace. Thought the kid was related to you at first with that weird aura and all, but he isn’t melting.”

“…”

The back door bangs open to reveal Kasamatsu wrapped in too many layers as per usual, holding a flashlight and a bag of groceries. He looks Takao up and down as he sets down the groceries and unwraps the scarf around his neck. “What is it? Don’t tell me you’re here to deliver Moriyama’s magazines—”

“That kid,” Takao says, pointing at the fireplace. Kasamatsu looks over and jumps, slightly. “Yeah, he does that. Delivered him to this guy’s on accident, but we can’t figure out where he came from. Supposed to go to his aunt, but we got no records in the system, chief. He just appeared on the doorstep.”

Kasamatsu frowns. “A kid? The plane doesn’t even come…you sure you’ve tried everything?”

“Ahem,” Mayuzumi clears his throat, and steps in to pull Kuroko’s wandering hand back from the flames. “What the hell are you doing? If you want to burn yourself—”

“Look,” Kuroko says, pointing at the fireplace. The flames flare up momentarily, and Mayuzumi’s eyes widen as he finds himself staring at an image of a rundown cabin near the woods. He immediately recognizes it as one of the abandoned homesteads to the west of town, right next to his fields. Kuroko looks back up towards Kasamatsu, his blue eyes wide. “Someone’s trapped inside. Isn’t there?”

“I’ll be damned,” Kasamatsu says, after a minute. He puts his hat back on, flattening his fluffy ears. “Who the hell’s this kid?”

“Knew there was something funny,” Takao grins. “Maybe he's related to you after all, Mayuzumi. Someone trapped inside, though, what’s that about?”

“Got a call this morning about the Koganei kid gone missing,” Kasamatsu grunts, grabbing his scarf again. “Couldn’t find him as much as I tried, but I guess, if what the kid says—Mayuzumi, that’s on your property, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly,” Mayuzumi says, wishing now that he’d never brought the kid here in the first place. _God, what a pain_. He pulls Kuroko up by the arm begrudgingly. “But close enough.”

 

 

 

Few people know the exact whereabouts of Mayuzumi’s fields, though not for much reason other than most simply do not care. Mayuzumi doesn’t care either, but for the reason of being the closest thing to Kuroko’s temporary caretaker he’s immediately dragged into the Koganei search party against his will.

“Aren’t you supposed to be delivering mail or something,” he grumbles up at Takao, who looks all too happy for someone on a rescue mission. Kuroko, whose powers do not extend to flying or teleporting or running at extreme speeds, clings to his back tightly.

“Nah,” Takao says, slowing his pace a bit. “Not much mail to deliver when the plane comes once a month, even with the overnight…you know that, don’t you?”

“Oi!” Comes a call from up ahead, next to one of the buildings. “It’s this one, I can smell him now!”

Takao flies over Mayuzumi’s head, diving so low his wings strike up snowdrifts that part before they splash all over him. No wonder Otsubo hired him, though the village is small enough that one mailman should be enough (which now makes Mayuzumi wonder just what exactly had been in the other boxes that had made him use the sled yesterday.)

“Huh.” Kasamatsu tries the door. “It’s locked. He’s inside alright, but…”

Kneeling down, Takao points at faint smudges in the snow. “Maybe he got in from the back door?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Kasamatsu begins, but Kuroko is already trotting towards the back. The police chief shakes off the snow on his hat, looking up at the overcast sky. It’s begun to drift again, and he lowers his voice. “Get the kid back. There’s someone else with Koganei inside, but I don’t recognize them.”

“Can I leave now,” Mayuzumi says, but nobody pays him any attention as they follow Kuroko behind the house. There’s definitely something weird about the place; he’d never given these shacks any thought when he surveyed his fields, but now that he’s come close Mayuzumi could say with almost certainty that it hadn’t been humans living here. At least the kid hadn’t ended up anywhere further off, like the forest beyond the horizon. “Hey, I said—“

“Mayuzumi-san?”

“?!” He whirls around to see Kuroko standing next to him again. “Weren’t you back there?”

“They went inside,” Kuroko replies. He tugs at Mayuzumi’s sleeve somewhat petulantly. “Go in.”

“Why sh—“ Mayuzumi begins, but he hears a scream, and the door swings open. “Oh, _fuck_ no.”

Despite the occasional rumors about what sort of weird powers Mayuzumi possesses owing to his reluctance to deal with most people, his lack of presence makes up the bulk of it. It isn’t like he could turn into a bear or a raincloud or command thousands of reindeer to besiege entire cities (that’s Akashi’s job.) So when Kuroko pulls him in, he could do nothing but yell as they tumble into a hole in the middle of the house.

He faceplants into snow (his only other talent), and feels a light _whump_ next to him as Kuroko does the same.

“W-who is that?” Someone says in the dark. “Mitobe? Is that you?”

Mayuzumi gropes around until he finds a stick. “Who the fuck is that?”

“It’s Koganei,” Kasamatsu’s voice rings out, somewhere close by. The flashlight clicks on and reveals the police chief to the right of him, and a brown-haired boy huddled next to him. Another click, and Mayuzumi sees, for a moment, a huge shadow on the ground. He opens his mouth, but the other voices cut his thoughts off. “Hey, some help here maybe? He’s got a broken leg.”

“Doesn’t help if we can’t get back up.”

“I’m up here,” Takao’s voice comes from above, a tad less cheery now. “Damn, what’s this hole even doing here?”

“How would I know?“

“Never mind,” Kasamatsu says gruffly, hoisting Koganei up to his feet. “Can you move? Tell us about it when we get back to the station.”

 

 

 

“So,” Mayuzumi says, once they’ve gone sufficiently far enough away from the police station that he’s sure nobody is listening, “About the fireplace.”

Kuroko, sipping on a milkshake one of the other officers had bought him, answers only after a minute.

“There was someone else with us in the pit.”

Mayuzumi sighs. He’d seen the look on Kasamatsu’s face after they’d gotten Koganei out of the pit, but neither he nor Takao had said anything on the way back. Neither had Koganei been much help; he’d been in bed one day and ended up in the hole the next, with no memory of how he’d gotten there.

“You know they have a family history of sleepwalking,” Kasamatsu had told them vaguely afterwards, after the write-up. Takao had shrugged and went back to the post office to close up. But Mayuzumi had never heard of such a thing before.

Whatever it had been was perhaps not worth stirring the town up over, Mayuzumi had decided. And neither was it any of his business, except now both the police chief and the post office had seemingly decided on him keeping Kuroko until they could figure out the kinks in the system.

He’d made to complain, but seeing Kuroko passed out in the office had unfortunately brought out a horrible, deeply hidden feeling of _responsibility_ he’s rarely felt before. _Why the fuck did I agree? Akashi would laugh at me, that asshole._

_…Wonder if I can send the kid to him._

Though, as such, he doesn’t want to think about the kind of experimenting Akashi would put the kid through when he inevitably finds out about the fireplace.

“There was nothing else,” he says slowly, as they head up the stairs. “Just the five of us.”

Kuroko stares up at him with his wide blue eyes, and for a moment Mayuzumi almost feels compelled to tell him _fine, well, I saw it too_ —until Kuroko looks away again, at the floor. “Okay.”

Somehow, Mayuzumi thinks glumly, he feels this would not be the end of it.


	2. 小雪

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mayuzumi receives an unexpected visitor as Kuroko runs off and discovers a magical forest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope yall read the tags bc this is the aokise chapter and also one of the angst and humor ones lol orz
> 
>  **Content Warnings (READ!!):** Character Death, Amputation
> 
> if there is anything else i missed please feel free to tell me in the comments!

In the old days people used to grow everything from the ground.

Mayuzumi himself had quite willingly embraced the technological advances that had come with humans moving into the area—the convenience of electronics and the Internet, getting regular mail and phone service, the works. There isn’t much selection in the tiny grocery on Main Street, but at least he could get all the coffee he needs without a hassle.

There are some things that you cannot buy from a store, however.

 

 

 

Every February, before planting time, Mayuzumi would place ads (in the paper, then online for the past few years) for “Customized hats! Send dimensions or seeds, will be ready for pickup in five years.”

Of course, nobody wants to wait so long anymore these days. It’s become almost a reflex at this point, and besides, money is easier to come by these days with his second job. He’d almost forgotten about this whole ordeal, until _that_ package arrived.

“What happened five years ago?” Kuroko asks from behind, making him jump again. His skinny legs are dangling as he tries to climb onto the sofa, bushing against Mayuzumi’s shoulders. Mayuzumi, with a sigh, lifts him up and deposits him on the seat beside him.

“Don’t do that again.”

“You haven’t told me what happened.”

He purses his lips, looking to the door. It is shut tight, as always. “Not a story for children. Isn’t it past bedtime for you?”

When he looks back to Kuroko, the child is already gone.

 

 

 

Mayuzumi wakes up to the sound of someone tapping gently at the door.

“Better not be a fucking raven,” he mutters as he extricates himself from the mess of blankets. A quick glance at the lump on the sofa on his way to the door tells him Kuroko is probably still fast asleep; Mayuzumi grabs the nearest coat from the rack, throws it on, and opens the door.

 _Damn that kid_ , he thinks as the wind whips around his face. “You could’ve warned me you were coming.”

“It _has_ been five years, no?”

The wind stops abruptly. Mayuzumi narrows his eyes, but doesn’t budge from where he stands. It won’t be a pleasant morning for either of them, now that he sees his caller had taken it upon himself to swipe the tools from the shed. “Not like I keep track, Nijimura. You could’ve also _completely_ refrained from dragging me into your little punishment game. That wasn’t a seed you sent me.”

“Imagine my surprise then when Imayoshi told me I had mail, then.”

Mayuzumi pushes him aside, sinking his bare feet into the snow that had built up overnight on his porch. A little softer than usual, thanks to global warming or whatever. He wrinkles his nose and slams the door shut. “I doubt glasses-creep told you to pass it to _me_. Stop spending time around Akashi.”

“Easy on the hypocrisy there,” Nijimura says, a wry smile on his lips. This only earns him an eye-roll from Mayuzumi. The long scythe rests easily on his shoulder, and he pats it before looking out west, towards the glitter on the horizon. “It’s time for the harvest.”

 

 

 

Kuroko had never been very good at running, but the light outside had seemed so welcoming he’d slipped on his shoes and run out the first chance he’d gotten, before Mayuzumi would be awake. Back home, he’d always found a way to have fun by himself, and out here is no exception. It’s not like his caretaker-of-sorts really restricts him from doing much; Mayuzumi spends most of his time alternating between drafting articles and mucking around in the field.

None of the adults seem to want to tell him what Mayuzumi does (he’s asked around—interesting how adults always show more than they let on simply by saying nothing.) But the fact of the matter is that he just doesn’t get _why_.

Even as a city kid who saw little magic around growing up, it’s not hard for Kuroko to figure out there are certain things he shouldn’t touch in his temporary abode. Weak presence and psychic abilities aside (it tended to make him sleepy, anyhow), Kuroko isn’t much different from a normal human. And there are things you simply can’t interact with, like the merchandise Mayuzumi keeps way out of his reach in the upper shelves of the storage shed.

 _Don’t touch things the fae grow_ , his mother had warned him.

The snow fairy doesn’t like interacting with the town much, but Kuroko had heard them talk about the forest-beyond-the-horizon, whispers of strange magic even in a place populated by humans and nonhumans alike. Even then it is not hard to follow the the sun’s movements, the sparse filaments of clear glass starting to form before him.

There is nothing but white, and his feet are starting to hurt.

Kuroko nears one of the branches experimentally, poking at it, but the whole thing cracks and shatters. The ice stings his face as he jumps, almost backing into another tree.

“Ah?”

All around him, he realizes, _is_ the forest. Tall pines and squat bushes, poppies with their red swirls in a glaze of glass, vines snaking down the length of each tree, stopping just short of the ground. A steady dripping sound echoes at the back of his mind. The wind chills his body, but Kuroko sees that none of it is moving; a dead forest of ice. 

The boy kneels down, pushing through the snow in search of anything living. A squirrel stares at him from behind a pinecone, but it, too, is covered in a clear film. When he nears it, he finds he can see every strand of fur standing straight up.

“No...”

He backs away, unsettled; in the reflection of a glassy pond he sees a figure sitting there, and it is towards him Kuroko asks, as loud as he could, “Who are you?”

There is no response.

“Hello?”

He sees movement, but all it is is the shallow heaving of the chest; that much at least tells Kuroko this person is alive, if entirely frozen on a throne of ice. The figure seems to float, ethereal. His golden hair rested against his cheeks, framing long soft-looking eyelashes seemingly apt to flutter open at any moment. He does not seem much older than Mayuzumi, though by now the boy knows he cannot judge a fairy’s age by appearance alone. His lips are upturned in a half-smile; gentle as it seems at first glance, there is something about it the child finds wild.

Kuroko, ever curious, reaches out a hand.

“Don’t touch,” comes a raspy voice from behind. He turns, surprised, at the man coming up the path towards him. “Who are you, boy? The hatter sent you?”

“You can see me?”

“Course I can see you, you’re moving,” the man grumbles, waving him away from the frozen person. It is then Kuroko sees he only has one arm. “So, is my order ready?”

“Ah. Um.” He hesitates; this wasn’t a situation he’d thought would crop up at all. “Which one do you mean? I can go back and check.”

As the man describes his order -- a massively complex _thing_ that Kuroko doesn’t understand in the slightest -- he notices the beads of water forming on the frozen man’s body, his visage misting over slightly. The sun above them is not as warm as it was where Kuroko had come from, but climate change is coming for them all the same. “What happens if he melts?”

“He can’t melt,” the man mutters, agitated now. He walks over to the grove of trees, gazing up at the drops of water coalescing at the tips of their branches. Kuroko sees that there is already white beginning to show in his dark hair. “The forest can’t--”

“Who is he, anyway?”

“He’s...” his voice trails off into a puff of cold air. “We grew up together. It’s a long story, kid.”

Kuroko frowns. “But you’re so much older! And he’s...not.”

“You’re right.” The man sighs, touching a branch longingly. Kuroko helps him dust the snow off a wooden bench nearby, and they sit, watching the forest sparkle. “Though _he_ was older than me, back then...”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Thirty years ago, Aomine Daiki had been a fifteen-year-old hoodlum on the streets in the far south, thousands of miles away from the blistering cold of the Arctic.

His father had been chauffeur to a young master, one of the rich playboys who needed to be driven around by someone who saw nothing and talked less. Sometimes Daiki would ride along in the backseat, fidgeting, in a fancier car than one he knows he would ever own. School must’ve been a drag, to the point where he couldn’t even remember what it was like anymore.

(What he remembers: catching the other boy’s eyes reflected in the mirror, golden and sly, and for the second time after discovering basketball did he feel something catch on fire inside him.)

An accident that summer would thrust his life onto a completely different path. Daiki had been riding in the back as always, and then the screech of wheels had thrown them off balance onto a nearby ditch.

When he awoke he found himself unharmed and facedown, his hand gripping tightly at someone else’s. The other boy blinked slowly, his face dirty from the fall, and Daiki felt a familiar coarseness under his fingers.

“Hey,” he said, softly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” said the other boy. And then, with a shaky smile, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

 

 

 

_(“I’m sorry,” Ryouta said quietly, sitting in the backseat. He was dressed in black, although there was no reason for him to, in the eyes of his peers._

_“It’s not your fault,” Daiki replied from up front. He hated how he could only think about how striking his hair was against the black, how it tried to hide the guilt pooling inside him. A hand touched his shoulder, warm and hesitant._

Nobody was supposed to survive that accident, _someone had told them._ You were lucky.

_He stepped on the pedal, hard, and down the road they went.)_

 

 

 

Months passed, then more. Daiki found himself driving all over the city to Ryouta’s increasingly frequent visits to the city commissioner’s office, and secret venues that Daiki came to know from the occasional whispers that were not places he should be. Though Ryouta was not much older than himself, the boy’s involvement in multiple affairs in the city were open secrets. That was just how the idle rich spent their time, Daiki thought. He thought nothing of it.

Still, he knew the streets of the city well enough to be able to finagle a distraction every now and then, between runs. There was an abandoned park far enough from the wealthy quarter of the city that nobody either knew would show up there, and it was there Daiki taught him how to play basketball.

“What do you guys play usually?”

“Eh. Polo,” Ryouta said, wrinkling his nose as he crouched low, concentrating on getting past Daiki. Both of them were panting already, the sun hanging low in the sky. “Boring stuff. Nothing like—”

He made a feint, and jumped; the ball went in through the hoop perfectly, and the gleeful smile on Ryouta’s face made Daiki forget everything else he was going to ask.

 

 

 

But nothing lasts forever.

“I’m getting married,” Ryouta said as he leaned back against the plush leather, his voice a distant cloud. They were parked outside the church Ryouta was going to be walking into with someone else, a month from now. Daiki felt something like needles pricking his skin, and it was cold. “To the commissioner’s daughter. Sealing a deal and all that. Aominecchi, I don’t wanna get married.”

“Satsuki got a job at the school recently,” Daiki said, robotically, his knuckles white against the steering wheel. He imagined himself charging into the white halls, sweeping Ryouta off his feet. Never mind the palace was always surrounded by dozens of guards, and he didn’t even have a knife at home. “So—“

“So you won’t be needing to do this anymore,” Ryouta finished for him. He looked down, at their dirty feet and scratched-up knees. Daiki had heard him complain before, that his parents were getting suspicious of his feigned clumsiness. “It’s okay.”

 _You don’t understand at all_ , Daiki thought, but he reached out for the other’s hand all the same. Something inside burned as he talked. “You don’t _have_ to marry her, stupid.”

“Aominecchi—“

 _We can go away, far away,_ he wanted to say, but the sound of footsteps jerked him back to reality as the car door opened. Ryouta looked at him one last time with bright golden eyes, and let himself be led out to the lawn below.

 

 

 

(“You _could’ve_ run away together,” Kuroko interjects, halfway through the story. His hand rests tentatively on the man’s knee. “Couldn’t you?”

“Well,” Daiki says, after a while. He looks up at the sky.)

 

 

 

Daiki did not attend the wedding. Instead, he packed his bags, and left a note under his sister’s pillow.

 _Satsuki would find me eventually_ , he thought to himself, if he weren’t to ever go back. The guilt ate at him even as he, and so many other lost children before him, took the vows and changed his name.

The church sent him to a mid-sized city in the heartlands, a world away from home for a boy who had not yet seen much of the world. It was quiet there. Good for study, his superiors had said, but even five years later Daiki was still as restless as he had been before, and spent all his time in the court next door, or sleeping on the roof instead of meditating or reading prayers.

The parish he belonged to saw some bad years, and he held more funeral services than weddings. Perhaps this was some sort of punishment for leaving—ah, but what good did it do to dwell on that? Nothing good would come of thinking about his past.

One morning a doctor came to the confession room, asking for forgiveness.

“What happened?” Daiki asked. There was silence on the other side. “Did—“

“My wife,” the bespectacled doctor said. He did not sound apologetic at all. “I did not bury her, after she died from the epidemic. Did you know, Father, that in ten years we’ll have the technology to revive the dead?”

“You have kept her body?”

“There is a freezer, in my hospital.”

 _What’s done is done. The dead don’t come back_. This much he tells the doctor, and he hears the man walk away from the booth.

Someone else came in, and Daiki’s heart seemed to still to a stop as the person spoke.

“When I was twenty I made a mistake.

“I fell in love with someone, but I couldn’t bring myself to go with him.”

There was no tear in the thin mesh screen separating them, but Daiki could still imagine, still see, strands of gold.

“How could I? It would’ve been a foolish thing to do. Though I guess I’m still a fool after all these years for coming here.

“Aren’t I, Aominecchi?”

 

 

 

(“You couldn’t run away,” Kuroko says quietly. “In the end.”

“Yeah, in a way,” Daiki replies. And then, “Hey, you don’t really sound like a kid, you know. Are you even human?”)

 

 

 

If loving Ryouta was wrong, he wouldn’t ever want to be right.

It was the name of a train station in the city that Ryouta had left him after exiting the confession room, and for a long moment after Daiki had entertained the thought of running after him, like nothing had ever happened. But how could he? Everything had happened, and it had gone on for far too long.

But he found himself boarding the train anyway, after telling the staff empathetically: I’ll be doing some shopping for Christmas.

 

 

 

The train was late.

Five o’clock, Ryouta had said. He arrived at seven, heart pounding, without any of the peace he’d perhaps tried to touch upon in his wavering faith. _Ryouta wouldn’t be there anymore_ , he decided, his footsteps feeling weighed down with iron even as he walked quicker and quicker towards the platform. He wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. Ryouta would be gone, he would be—

—there, neat luggage-case resting beside his legs and all, his eyes brightening as he saw Daiki come up the steps. His hair was shorter, his clothing stylish; the old stud he’d had in his ear had been replaced, but some things did not change, after all.

Then, as Daiki walked towards him, he heard a sharp crack.

Then another.

He ran forward and caught Ryouta as he fell, without thinking, without even noticing the bullet digging into his own shoulder and the blood leaking from the wound. Someone was screaming, and in the chaos and stampede that followed he only took one glance back at the jostling crowd: the commissioner waving a gun, an angry snarl on his face, his daughter on the floor, and in her arms—

The child had been crying. Daiki turned and fled down the stairs, the movements of Ryouta’s chest growing weaker by each step.

 

 

 

When the doctor opened the door that cold wintry night he found two people unconscious at his door; Ryouta whose heartbeat had slowed to a stately largo and Daiki whose wound had festered and blackened in the chill.

When Daiki came to he found the doctor humming as he polished his tools, and the painful throb of his left shoulder reminding him why he was here.

“Ryouta,” was all he said. “Doctor, do you still have room?”

“Not here,” the doctor said. He pointed at the map hung above their heads, his finger tracing the jagged lines that ran across the borders. Daiki’s eyes followed, watering, dazed, until the end— “North. I’ve called ahead. The train will leave soon, with an iced compartment usually reserved for seafood.”

“I can’t let him be found,” Daiki said, raising an arm to his face, only at that moment realizing what had happened to him. “I…”

“There is no need to thank me,” Imayoshi says, his smile strangely feral as he helped Daiki off the surgical table. “In due time what you lost will be returned.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“So you ended up here,” Kuroko says, in wonder.

The barren land stretches out for miles all around them, in a winter that never ends. Their only refuge from the all the people Daiki ever knew, all the people who would come looking for him and Ryouta, and the heavens above.

He’d always wondered whether or not Satsuki had tried to look for him, or if the commissioner had canvassed the entire country to find his son-in-law, or if the doctor would ever send him a prosthetic…

It’s too much to think about. Daiki stands up, stretching. “Hey, kid, you know how to play basketball?”

Kuroko stares at him. “But…”

“Bet I can still win with one arm.”

 

 

 

They walked across the snowy plain together, to the jagged mountains in the east at the edge of the world, where nothing grew. Mayuzumi had not planted the seed in his fields; it would have guaranteed crop failure for years, and despite being a fairly successful online author he didn’t want to take chances with his other profession. At least furry porn wasn’t going to consign him to this sort of fate, he’d thought, but it was of little comfort.

“Kind of far out, don’t you think,” Nijimura comments as he pokes at an outcrop of rock nearby with the scythe. Not even the hardiest of weeds would cling to the ground here, nor would birds roost on the dead limbs of the trees. It is silent all around them, save the wind howling down their backs.

“Kind of didn’t want my property to be cursed,” Mayuzumi replies a little snippily. “Look.”

In the clearing something long and thin pokes out of the snow like a dried stalk of wheat, with a length of black fabric flapping around in the wind stuck to it. Closer inspection revealed the stalk to be white as bone—literally.

Mayuzumi gives his companion a sidelong glance. “There’s the fucking arm you sent me.”

“Okay, okay,” Nijimura sighs. “You don’t have to keep harping on it.”

He swings the scythe, and the robe gently flutters to the ground, a pool of black fabric stark against the white snow. Mayuzumi watches warily as Nijimura picked it up, feeling the fabric between his fingers. _I am_ , he decides, _never going to answer the door again._

“Well, let’s go find him now,” Nijimura tells him.

“Yes, lets!” comes a voice, higher and somewhat less familiar behind them. Mayuzumi stares past Nijimura’s shoulder at the intruder, feeling his annoyance rise to unprecedented levels.

 _God, I fucking hate babysitting_.

 

 

 

Kuroko face-plants into the snow, exhausted. Daiki had been right; there had been no competition whatsoever.

“Wow, that was…something.”

“You’re an adult,” Kuroko says in his unaffected way, though inside he wonders if he could beat the other man even if he suddenly grew taller. “Of course you would win.”

“Still.”

Even with the snow cleared, the hard frozen ground is ill-suited for this sort of sport. Daiki only practices now for there is little else to do, alone.

None of it had seemed to matter back then, when he looked at Ryouta in the eye, their movements mirroring each other on the court, his laugh echoing in his ears. Ryouta, now sleeping in the ice, bound between life and death. Even then…

“It still matters,” he says finally, looking at the young boy with his wide blue eyes. Maybe he’d been that naive then. “Ryouta…his son…he was only half your age when we left.”

“I suppose he must hate me.”

Kuroko frowns. “Did he ever come find you?”

“No,” Daiki says. He looks at the horizon, and the dripping water. “Well, even if he did…”

“Look!”

The boy points at the figures coming through the crystal-clear trees, one of them familiar, the other one—

“I am not even going to ask,” Mayuzumi says upon seeing Kuroko, pulling him aside before the boy could say any more. “Actually, _why_ the hell are you here? Didn’t I leave you at home?”

“But you just contradicted yourself!”

“Shut—oi, Nijimura, just get _on_ with it.”

Daiki stares at the newcomers suspiciously, standing in front of Ryouta’s frozen throne. There seems something a little familiar about the man called Nijimura, and the thing he holds in his hand. “Wait, who are you? What are you here for—”

“Are you his son?” Kuroko asks as he points at Ryouta, before Mayuzumi could put a hand over his mouth. “Are you going to kill—“

“About time, then,” Daiki says. “I’ve been living here long enough.”

Nijimura throws the robe at him, and Daiki catches it, confused. “Do you even know how long you’ve been here? How old you are?”

“T…Twenty years?” He frowns, doing the math in his head. “I’m…fifty?”

Mayuzumi shakes his head, holding Kuroko’s thin little arms firmly lest he run off again. Nijimura purses his lips, but it is not his voice that speaks up. “Wrong, Dai-chan—but oh, you couldn’t ever do math anyway.

“Dai-chan, you’re _three hundred years old_.”

 

 

 

“…Satsuki?”

It’s unmistakable, that voice, and her hair still as long and glossy as he remembers it to be from her girlhood. Daiki stares in amazement as he watches his sister hop out from behind Nijimura, the expression on her face oddly sad even as her appearance tugs him out of those memories. “You really messed it up this time, you know?”

“But then…how am I…how are you…”

Momoi sighs. “Ah, this is only…well, I was hoping you’d remember better if I came to you this way.”

“Idiot,” Nijimura sighs, flicking his forehead. “Don’t you remember? You weren’t supposed to run off and become a priest. You were supposed to _take his soul_.”

 

_Nobody was supposed to survive that accident._

 

Daiki staggers backwards, shaking. Like water flowing through the crevices of his mind, cold and creeping, bit by bit he starts to remember: _he had been flying, oh yes, high above the city. It was the only thing that had been true._

 _It was supposed to be a normal mission._ Take all three in the car, _his captain had told him. Then he’d made the mistake of looking through the window: golden locks, a painfully arrogant smile._

_He’d been eighteen and beautiful, and Daiki’s next victim._

I don’t want that _, Daiki remembers thinking._ I wanted—

 

“You possessed the boy in the backseat, remember?”

 

_Everywhere he went, the people would whisper about him, joking about the number of people who died whichever parish he was sent to. Now, he remembers…_

 

Mayuzumi takes a step back as the robes in Daiki’s arms started to move as if it had a life of its own, expanding and covering him. Kuroko looks, wide-eyed, at the new arm sprouting from his left sleeve, and the lines fading from his face. “…?!“

“Fucking reapers,” Mayuzumi mutters. Even after so long Kise’s chest still moves, his breath still fogs the clear ice—as long as his reaper had forgotten about his past, there would be no death for him. “What a handful.”

“Dai-chan—“ Momoi leans forward, touching his hand. “Do you want to go home now?”

Daiki turns to look at Nijimura, to the scythe now in his hands, and then to Ryouta. “I…”

“Jeez, you really want to do this the hard way, huh?”

Kuroko gasps as the branch next to him catches aflame, then the next, and the bushes beneath. Feeling the heat on his back, Mayuzumi curses loudly and scampers out of the way of the fire, the cascading snow, icy water running in rivulets beneath their feet. All around them the forest is burning, burning, burning, light flickering in their faces.

“What in the fu—are you _trying_ to kill me?!”

Ryouta opens his eyes.

Kuroko faints.

 

 

 

Daiki drops his weapon. “Ryouta—!”

“Aominecchi.”

Ryouta’s hand is cold as he caresses Daiki’s face, but his eyes are resolute, and both of them know. All this time he’d known, from the moment he looked out the window and saw something glittering there, something blue. He’d seen the same thing in Daiki’s eyes, after the accident.

“I saw you then, you know.

“I didn’t want to go. You might have killed me eventually, Aominecchi. But…

“But…”

He laughs.

“But then—maybe I was dumb for thinking this—I thought I’d be able to take it, if it were you. I’d fight you off if you tried anything stupid.”

“You were always a fighter,” Daiki says, smiling. “Ryouta, I—“

Ryouta shakes his head, pressing a finger to his lips. His smile is soft. “Just take me home now, Aominecchi. Wherever you will go.

_“We’ve been here for far too long.”_

Then, as Kuroko comes to, he sees Daiki’s body seemingly vanish, a streak of midnight blue, swift and weightless. As soon as it touched Ryouta he fell to the ground, a streak of gold leaving his body as it turns to ash; together they rise high, high up into the air, spreading across the sky until it is all they see. The heavens shimmer as if aflame, nothing at all like the pictures in Kuroko's textbooks.

“Aurora borealis,” Mayuzumi says, and even his voice is a little shaky. Kuroko, mesmerized by the lights dancing in synchronized motion, feels the grip on his hand loosen just a little.

 

 

 

“That was the exact opposite of how I wanted my day to go,” Mayuzumi grumbles as he pours tea for Momoi, who is sitting across from Kuroko at the table.

“You don’t mind me being here, do you, Tetsu-kun?” Momoi asks kindly, pushing her cup in Kuroko’s direction. Kuroko nods shyly, but does not take the tea. “I didn’t know you were so kind as to take in a lost child, Mayuzumi-kun.”

Mayuzumi makes a noise halfway between a choke and a grunt. “Yeah, as if I had a choice.”

“We all have choices, no?”

Nijimura had gone back with the other two (“Just to make sure it’s settled,” he’d said, before leaving. “Imayoshi’s always been too lax with him.”) after the whole debacle, but Momoi had insisted on coming back to check on him.

“Akashi-kun asked me to,” she’d said. Mayuzumi had rolled his eyes and told her he could come himself, but no—he’s _busy_ , what with the holidays coming up and all. In any case, she’d seemed to have taken a fancy to the kid.

As he watches them, Mayuzumi idly considers the possibility of handing Kuroko over to her; sure, Momoi’s always busy herself, but she seems to handle rowdy children just fine (though he isn’t so sure how a human kid would fare living on the other shore.) Kuroko is not much trouble at home, though the moment he gets out of the house everything in the universe seems to conspire to get Mayuzumi involved in what looks increasingly to be the weirdest coming-of-age rites ever.

…Or not, he decides finally, as he sees her pull out what looks like a deformed cookie from her purse. “Momoi, _please put that away._ ”

It is then Kuroko slips away from the table, as the adults, as they were, start arguing over mind-boggling things like nutrition again. He walks over to the window, looking at the fresh prints in the snow outside. They are bigger than his and Momoi's, though not as big as Mayuzumi’s, and all of _their_ footprints lead all the way up to the door. But the prints are human, whoever they belong to.

“You must be lonely out there,” he tells the snow, watching his breath fog up in the windowpane. For a moment, just a moment, he thinks he sees the outline of something familiar. Then, it is gone.

High above them, the northern lights continue to shiver and sparkle into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next chapter will resume your ~~taco~~ takao  & villager shenanigans


	3. 大雪

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takao takes Kuroko to the toy shop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ao3 had a hiccup last night so sorry for uploading this a bit late! ...it's still the 7th in some parts of the world, right.  
> this is vaguely a two-parter with the next chapter; it was getting a little too longwinded so i decided to cut it orz.

There is, Kuroko notices, a dried something on the ground, round and withered. He’d accidentally knocked over one of the boxes piled up in the corner of the living room, spilling its contents to the ground. Most of it had been books filled with pictures and languages Kuroko could not understand, and some dog-eared pop-lit magazines that had seen better days.

“Is this a seed?” he asks Mayuzumi when the snow fairy finally comes home. It is past eight now, an unusually late time for him to do so. Mayuzumi takes one look at the mess he’s made and cleaned up and rolls his eyes. “What does it turn into?”

“Won’t you find out once you plant it?” Mayuzumi replies, reaching for his coffee mug. In truth, he doesn’t remember. Though he always (well, almost always) makes sure all the truly horrible stuff stays sealed in the warehouse, there’s probably tons of spare, forgotten seeds he’s left scattered around the place. In the past, when there were more children, and bolder children, he’d have his hands full yelling at them running away with handfuls of kernels.

In the hands of a human, most of them don’t grow into much, if they grow at all—a policeman’s cap, a pair of wings, half a length of yarn.

Kuroko thinks about it, running the seed over his knuckles.

“I guess.”

 

 

 

Takao loves watching the sun rise.

He always wakes up (or at least, gets out of the house) before everyone else in town does, just to sit on the rooftop and take things in. The cold is relentless here year-round, bone-chilling in winter and just barely bearable in summer. What makes it worth it, in his mind, is the pink-and-gold slowly peeking out of the horizon, reflecting against the stark white land, the deep blue of the still-slumbering sky.

Although he has to wait just a little longer in winter to see it.

“Good morning,” Takao calls out to the rabbits hopping by his house, but they just hop away a little faster than before, only stopping at the top of the hill to gaze at him suspiciously before darting away again. “Hey, I wasn’t gonna eat you.”

“Might as well have, you’re so loud,” grumbles a voice from behind. Miyaji, as Takao has figured out over the past few weeks they’ve been flatmates, fucking hates mornings. “Ugh. _Do_ you eat rabbits, like, whole?”

“Not like _that_ ,” Takao replies, mock-incredulously. “What, you want me to catch you — “

“…Never mind.”

 

 

 

“Huh,” Otsubo says, turning over one of the letters on the desk. “That’s interesting.”

Takao looks up from his pile, shaking the tinsel out of his hair. It’s _that_ time of the year again, when the amount of mail Middle-of-Nowhere gets becomes thrice as large as it is normally. “What, another kid?”

“Good lord, no.” Sighing, Otsubo walks over to hand it to him, carefully avoiding the amount of decorations currently spilled onto the ground. Tripping over all of these badly-wrapped presents will be the death of them. “This place - it’s at the end of Main - well…”

“Isn’t that the toy shop that’s like, haunted or something,” Miyaji comments from the storage. There’s a muffled thump, and they hear him swear. Otsubo gives him a Look as soon as he comes out of the room, one that doesn’t escape Takao’s gaze. “I mean—anyway, Kiyoshi’s coming over later to fix the damn phone. About time, I say.”

“I’ll check it out later,” Takao says brightly, throwing the letter into his pouch. He stands up and stretches, catlike. “Can’t hurt, right?”

“Check out the kid too, while you’re at it,” Otsubo calls out after him, as the door swings shut. “I hope Mayuzumi’s been looking after him better now, after last week.”

Miyaji watches him go, plopping down on the seat Takao had just evacuated. “Heard there was some sort of freak light show the other day. That the kid?”

“Don’t even ask,” Otsubo mutters.

 

 

 

“For the love of—“ Mayuzumi swears as the door swings open, letting the wind and snow and god knows what else into the house. “ _You!_ Can’t you fucking knock?”

“Just wanted to borrow Kuroko-kun for a minute,” Takao says brightly, completely ignoring the snow fairy rolling his eyes and muttering darkly in favor of the kid lounging in the corner over some dubious-looking articles of literature. “It’s not healthy keeping him cooped up inside, you know. Kids need fresh air!”

“You would rather those— _things_ happen again?”

“Won’t be the worst thing you could do,” Takao replies, looking down at Kuroko and the magazine flipped open on his lap. “I mean, you’re letting him read gravure magazines? _Please_ , Mayuzumi, I can’t b—”

Mayuzumi swears and jumps out of his chair. “Kuroko, what the _fuck_ , those aren’t for you—”

“Hey, hey, it’s fine! Here.“ Takao whisks the magazine out of Kuroko’s hands, throwing it back into the box behind. “Done. Now, _should_ I go back and file a report on child endangerment to Kasamatsu like a good upstanding citizen…or, if you’ll just let me take him out, we can forget about all that?”

He can see Kuroko’s lips twitch upward in a smile; Mayuzumi looks as close to blowing a fuse as he ever would, though most of it is in the glare he’s directing Takao’s way: _what the everloving fuck, did you just blackmail me._

“Do you want to go outside, Kuroko?”

“Yes,” the boy says, without a trace of hesitance. After a moment’s silence Mayuzumi mutters something and storms off into the kitchen, but as they leave Takao could almost say he looked somewhat relieved.

 

 

 

“Can you tell me what’s inside the shop?”

Kuroko stands on his tiptoes on the pavement, peeking into the dusty storefront. There are cracks, thin and large, like spiderwebs across the glass; if one looks closely enough, they would be able to read the words _Lucky Items_ in old-fashioned lettering faded beneath the grime. “Toys.”

“Toys?”

“Soldiers and fairies,” he says, nodding. “Dollhouses. They look kind of broken, though.”

“Well then.” Takao looks around; at this end of the street, there are barely any people loitering around. He tries the door, and, upon finding it creak open at the slightest touch, raises an eyebrow. “Guess there really isn’t anyone here.”

Kuroko squeezes past him into the crack. “That’s not true.”

“Oh?”

Though the sun is overhead by now, illuminating a patch of the wooden floor, it would be gone in a couple hours. Takao lets himself into the store after Kuroko, listening to the faint tinkle of the wind-chimes above their heads.

The crisp, precise handwriting on the letter spells out the shop’s address, and a name: _Midorima Shintarou_.

“Funny there’s no sender’s information,” Takao says, almost to himself. Then he sees Kuroko fiddling with the wooden cabinets, rows and rows of toys neatly placed behind panels of clear glass. It’s much cleaner on the inside than he’d expected, for a place that’s been long abandoned. “Hey, what’s that you got there?”

“How did you get in here?”

The voice is quiet but firm, coming from above the stairs. Takao looks up, tilting his head at the pair of legs that had appeared on the steps. There seems no malice in its aura, but he reaches out and pulls Kuroko back all the same.

“Just delivering mail,” Takao says as he sees more of the person appear, clean leather shoes and strikingly ugly Christmas sweater and all. Kuroko tries to wriggle out of his grip to no avail. “The door wasn’t locked, you know. Hey, you wouldn’t happen to be this—Midorima Shintarou guy, would you?”

The man stands at the base of the stairs, looking at him warily through a pair of oddly-shaped, hot pink glasses. Kuroko manages to not laugh at his outlandish outfit, but Takao is less successful. “I…have not received mail in a long time.”

“Oh, don’t worry, we all get those days,” Takao replies brightly, sliding the letter onto the desk, beside the radio. The man—Midorima, it has to be—walks towards them slowly, picking up the letter; the fingers on his left hand, Takao observes, is heavily bandaged. He picks it up as if lifting an explosive, turns it over, and frowns. “Eh? Is there a mistake—”

“Why are you wearing glasses like that?” Kuroko pipes up at this very moment, pointing at Midorima’s face. Immediately the man looks like an affronted owl, clutching the letter close to his chest. “They look funny.”

“Kuroko—“

“It’s today’s lucky item,” Midorima says crossly, narrowing his eyes. “Now will you two leave? The shop isn’t open today.”

Kuroko blinks. “But I thought—“

“Now, now, let’s listen to Shin-chan, we can come back tomorrow if you want toys—you’re open on Wednesdays, aren’t you?”

“What is this ‘Shin-chan’ nonsense—“

Takao winks at him as he escorts Kuroko out the door. “See you!”

 

 

“You know he’s a ghost, right?”

Kuroko hums, ignoring Takao as he runs towards a mound of snow, digging through the pile until he looks back up at the postman. “Does it matter?”

“I suppose it doesn’t,” Takao murmurs, mostly to himself; Kuroko is already looking away, mesmerized by the huge, dusty tomes in the bookstore window, then the fresh loaves in the bakery’s showcase. “You hungry?”

“No.”

It is then Kuroko’s stomach decides to make a traitorous noise, and they stare at each other until Takao sighs and pushes the glass door open. “Should I even ask what Mayuzumi feeds you?”

 

 

 

“Do I want to know why you’re here.”

“Isn’t that a rude thing to ask your boyfriend?”

Mayuzumi rolls his eyes as he lets Akashi in, taking the other’s coat. “As if nothing shady _ever_ goes wrong when you visit me. Is this about the kid? He isn’t here right now.”

Akashi sighs, taking his hand. “Chihiro, I am only taking a _very_ brief break from my duties because I need to pick up my order, which I already called you about. I also wanted to look at your face. Is that not enough?”

“Wait just a minute,” Mayuzumi says, giving him a quick peck on the cheek. He steps into the bedroom, rummaging around his dresser—sorely in need of organizing—until he finds the sweater he is looking for: “I Fucked Santa Claus and All I Got Was This Shirt!”

It’s certainly the best decision he could’ve made, he thinks as he emerges from the room once more to see the perplexity in Akashi’s expression melt into mild disappointment at his wardrobe choices. “Really.”

“Really,” Mayuzumi says, somewhat smugly. “If you’re gonna pester me with your wisdom again, I need to prepare myself.”

 

 

 

“Mido-chin? What about him?”

“That what you call him?” Takao asks, leaning against the counter. Kuroko sips on a milkshake behind him—it’s all he’d wanted to order, to Takao’s surprise, but hey, he isn’t a shining example of healthy living either. Behind the counter, the giant, lumbering man who seems to be the sole proprietor of the bakery looks out the window, thoughtful (or maybe just sleepy.) “How long’s he been in there?”

The man—the tag on his apron reads _Murasakibara_ —shakes his head. Behind him, there’s a large ‘Help Wanted’ sign, the colored ink faded with age. “Dunno. It’s been a couple years, though—since the war. Maybe earlier than that, even.”

“What war?”

“There’s only the one,” Murasakibara says, motioning towards the propaganda posters on the wall. “That was before I came here. Eh, the humans don’t really think he exists, most of the time. Mido-chin keeps to himself.”

“Well, _he_ isn’t any ordinary human,” Takao nods at Kuroko, who’s now dozing off on the sofa near the door. “And I’m only half, if you were wondering.”

Murasakibara makes a noise that sounds somewhere between a grunt and a yawn. “Eh, doesn’t matter to me. Don’t you still have stuff to deliver, though?”

“…Right.”

Takao gently shakes Kuroko awake and, after nodding a goodbye to Murasakibara, goes back out into the cold once more. Kuroko yawns as he leads him down the road, stopping every so often to check the mailboxes; Miyaji would have taken care of the bigger parcels already, having taken the sled today. The lights are already up on almost every building they pass by: red and green and yellow and blue, shimmering softly as the daylight starts to fade around them.

“Got any wishes for Santa this year?”

Kuroko stops and stares behind them at his own footprints. There’s something about the way he’s looking at the snow, Takao thinks, that’s decidedly familiar, but he cannot pinpoint what it is. “Mm. Not really.”

“Not even to see your aunt?” They start down the path leading to Mayuzumi’s house, at the very end of Phantom Lane on the outskirts of the village. Takao looks up at the sky, noting the position of the sun. Kuroko shakes his head. “Your parents, then?”

He feels Kuroko’s grip on his hand tighten. “No.”

“Alright.”

They don’t talk any more for the rest of the journey.

 

 

 

The next day, as Takao lands on Mayuzumi’s front porch, he realizes something is amiss.

“Hm, he isn’t here today.”

He knocks on the door, waiting, but there is no response.

“Wonder if Mayuzumi found out about that milkshake…”

After a while of poking around—there is nobody inside as far as he could tell, save for whatever was growing in the shed out back. He spots some footprints near the window, a little too large to be child-sized, faint and unfamiliar. Perhaps Kuroko had run off to cause trouble somewhere else, taking Mayuzumi with him.

Takao isn’t about to go and find out, however. It’s a day off for him today, and he’s intent on making the best out of it.

“Shin-chan!”

“What the hell was that,” Midorima says, materializing out of the cabinets like the spectre of an angry carrot, “And why are you here? Don’t tell me you have another delivery, I haven’t asked—“

“You said you’d be open, didn’t you?”

Midorima takes a deep breath, staring at the name tag on his chest. He’s wearing normal glasses today, Takao observes. “Look, Takao…or whatever. Whoever you are. Do I look open to you?”

Takao thinks for a while. “Well…would you be open, if I said I wanted to buy a present? How can a toy shop be closed when it’s almost Christmas?”

“…You actually want to be here?”

“Look, you’re—this place—is _definitely_ not the weirdest thing around,” Takao replies, jerking a finger towards the door. “Like, you _are_ strange, but no. That’s what I think, anyway, if you’ll take the word of a newcomer.”

Midorima doesn’t say any more as Takao strolls around the store leisurely, taking note of the way everything is meticulously ordered. The only exception, he finds, is the empty drawers in the back, where he spots several seeds rolling around amongst the dust and wood chips.

From Murasakibara’s description, it seemed like even the nonhuman elements in town did not frequently patronize the place. _I must be the first person to walk in here in a while_ , Takao thinks as he looks back at Midorima.

“Hey—“

“Just tell me when you find something,” Midorima mutters, turning away. “…I’ll be at the front desk.”

There aren’t that many children living in the village—there was that Koganei kid and his friends, who he sometimes glimpsed in the schoolyard behind the police station. Most of the people with younger siblings had come to live here alone, though occasionally Takao would see Otsubo’s sister come around the post office.

Well. That leaves his own sister, living back in the city half a world away away…and Kuroko.

“Say, Shin-chan,” Takao murmurs, turning over an intricately-carved rabbit statue, “You wouldn’t have like, a bestselling items list or something to go off of, would you?”

Midorima doesn’t look at him; instead, he fiddles with the radio, tuning the buttons as he speaks. “I made everything myself.”

“Ah.”

Takao surveys the things laid out on the tables, and then to the cabinets. It’s strange, he thinks, how everything outside is broken, but everything inside the cabinets, from the actual toys to the spare parts, look new. Upon closer inspection, however, he finds mismatched buttons on the gremlins’ clothes, carefully re-sewn onto each little pocket. The pink hats of the fairy dolls are attached firmly to their heads, with only the thinnest traces of translucent glue peeking out. Several of the pieces have fissures, so tiny only a hawk’s eye would catch it, but it is apparent there had been great care given to each and every item inside the store.

“I’ll take this one, then.”

Midorima looks up at the pomsky doll placed in front of him. “…”

Takao tilts his head. “What?“

“Good morning! Today’s date is December 7, 1943…” The radio suddenly crackles to life, a staticky voice chirping peppily in the silence between them. “…number…Cancer ranks…your lucky item is a bird, and your lucky color is blue! In first rank we have Scorpio, your lucky item is something that can be planted, your lucky color is green…”

“Eh?”

“Mm.” Midorima looks away, but it’s clear as day he’d been staring at Takao’s uniform. “It’s old. Don’t pay any attention to it.”

“If you say so,” Takao says. He pockets the change, glancing briefly at the ornate feather quill Midorima is using to painstakingly document the transaction, his hand shaking as he pulls out wrapping paper from beneath the desk. Despite the claims of this place being deserted, there seems to be heating inside, but Midorima does not take his very warm-looking sweater off, and Takao cannot see past the sliver of wrist between the man’s bandages and his sleeves. There is blood, he realizes, old blood darkened by time, beneath those bandages.

Takao doesn’t know much about ghosts, only that their appearances stay frozen at their time of death.

“Thank you,” Midorima finally says when he is done, his expression stiff as always, but his voice is less hostile this time. “…Please come again.”

“Oh, I will,” Takao replies, smiling. “I’ve got some more gifts to pick out, after all.”

 

-

 

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Kuroko says. “Here. I want to plant it here.”

“Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you,” Mayuzumi says, watching the kid go at it with his little spade. The ground is hard and unforgiving, and it does not take much time to hit the permafrost below the thin soil in this part of the world. However impressed he is with Kuroko’s perseverance, Mayuzumi is less impressed with the tiny dent in the ground after an hours’ work. “You know, Santa came by yesterday. If you hadn’t gone out, you could’ve made your wish then.”

“Santa isn’t real.”

_Santa gave me hickeys while you were out_ , Mayuzumi thinks, but he only shrugs and puts a hand over Kuroko’s. “Yeah, sure. You’re gonna catch a cold at the rate you’re going.”

The spade slams into the ground, taking out a chunk of dirt; Kuroko lets go for a moment, fascinated even as some of it falls on his shoes. Though there’s admittedly less magic involved than centuries of practice, Mayuzumi hands the spade back to him. “Now you try.”

Kuroko stares at the spade in concentration.

It shoots out of Mayuzumi’s hand, the flat of it slapping his thigh. The snow fairy yells and jumps back as the thing clatters to the ground. “What the hell—Kuroko!“

“…Sorry.” Kuroko shakes his head, picking the spade up again. “Are you okay, Mayuzumi-san?”

“…That was on purpose, wasn’t it.”

Still, after a few tries, Kuroko finally gets a decent-sized hole in the ground. It’s apparent he’s even more exhausted after exercising his mental capacities than his physical ones, though at this point Mayuzumi is sufficiently pleased with his work that he helps the kid pat the dirt back after the seed is planted. “Well, that’s that. Don’t know how long it’s gonna take.”

“It will grow,” Kuroko murmurs sleepily, swaying then falling forward; Mayuzumi catches him before he falls face-first into the ground. “Mm.”

Mayuzumi rolls his eyes, hauling the kid away from the plot of ground. Something moves not far away in the bushes, and he looks up, suddenly alert—but there is nothing there.

“Huh.”

A cat, maybe. Mayuzumi looks at the ground, over towards the horizon where the newly harvested fields sleep under the faint light of the stars, bare stalks dangling limply in the wind. Too many weird, unprecedented things happened since Kuroko had arrived, and Akashi’s visit had only confirmed it further. It isn’t like the police are looking to send Kuroko home anymore (though he doesn’t feel like asking.)

Though, he reflects, it hasn’t been all _that_ bad. He shrugs, throwing it all to the back of his head for the moment, and turns towards home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> takao lied about the magazine (momoi always makes sure to ~~burn~~ take away aomine's orders the moment they come)


	4. 冬至

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kuroko meets a boy at the beach.

“What’s the highest mountain in the world?”

“Mount Everest,” Kuroko says, scribbling the words into his workbook. Mayuzumi didn’t bother looking behind him as he typed away at his desk, thinking about where he should set his next story.

 _You know kids his age should be in school, right?_ had been part of the message he’d gotten from Akashi last week before his visit. On one hand, Mayuzumi wishes Akashi would stop sending vaguely threatening voicemails via fireplace. On the other, giving Kuroko something to occupy his time with had seemed like a good way to curb Mayuzumi’s need to do damage control on whatever supernatural bullshit the kid was prone to digging up.

Still, he’s not so sure Kuroko would fit that well into the village primary, and neither did he want to deal with a throng of kids trampling into his house after school. So Mayuzumi looks back to the textbook on his desk. “And the longest river?”

“The Nile?”

“Wow, these textbooks sure are bullshit,” Mayuzumi says, frowning at the answer. “Don’t you know anything about Piyo-Piyo River?”

He hears Kuroko put down the book, and suddenly the kid is beside him again. “What’s that?”

“Go to the beach and you’ll see,” is all Mayuzumi says. “I mean like, _now_. I need to finish drafting this today, otherwise Mibuchi is going to _roast_ me.”

 

 

 

Even in summer the northern shores are cold and restless, and Kuroko makes sure not to go too near as he walks along the beach, stuffing his pockets with pieces of wood and smooth stone. Salt spray clings to his hair, and he looks up to see something move just beyond the bend.

“The river, eh?” Takao had said back at the post office, when Kuroko asked, “Did they teach you about ocean currents in school?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, I’m not too sure about it either, but Shin-chan told me—ah, it’s a current, you see, that’s the longest river in the world.” The mailman had winked at him. “Apparently people used to send messages using the fish here, before the post system came about. Maybe you can find something down there, hm?”

“Don’t keep his hopes up,” Kasamatsu told him from across the street as he adjusted the wreath hanging on the station door. “The fish don’t talk much these days.”

Kuroko approaches the stranger cautiously, though aware that he is quite intent on doing his fishing. The kid doesn’t look much older than him, though he is taller and stronger, the expression on his face surly as he casts his line, waiting among the rocks.

He’s sure he’s seen this person somewhere before.

“Hello?”

“Agh! Wh—“ He nearly drops the pole, whirling around to look at Kuroko. “What the hell! Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“Are you fishing for messages?”

“None of your business,” the other boy says brusquely, but he pauses as he watches Kuroko struggle to get up the rocks. “Hey, that’s dangerous, what—“

Kuroko wobbles, but holds himself firm against the rocks even as a particularly large wave hits, splashing chilly foam all over his sleeves. Along with something else—he grabs at the bottle, a grimy green-glass object that had washed to his feet. “I’m—fine! I’m fine.”

“No you’re not!”

The other boy jumps down from his perch, pole forgotten, and hauls Kuroko down towards the little hut hidden underneath a rocky outcrop a ways from the water. Kuroko winces as he’s almost thrown unceremoniously onto a rickety chair; it looks like a fisherman’s hut, he realizes as he sees the rods and jars of bait lining the tabletops, heavy raincoats thrown over backs of chairs. There isn’t much else around other than a makeshift bed, the minimalistic feeling of the one-room hut contrasted with the amount of merchandise and various things Mayuzumi kept (somewhat neatly) in his house.

Kuroko sneezes as a coat is thrown at him.

“Great,” the other boy says. He turns on the stove and places a worn kettle on top. “Please don’t get a cold. Where did you even come from? I’ve never seen you around before.”

Kuroko stares at his eyebrows. They look like crossed twigs, he decides, but it isn’t the time to mention that right now. “I haven’t seen you around before, either. Do you go to school?”

“…Not really.” He purses his lips, watching the kettle go. “Not that I would’ve seen you if I did. I’m Kagami.”

“I’m Kuroko.” The kettle goes off then, and Kagami quickly turns it off, pouring out the hot water. He shoves the mug of tea at Kuroko, who gratefully accepts. “I live with Mayuzumi-san.”

“…Who?”

“Never mind.” Kuroko takes a sip. “Do you live here?”

“Well—“

“Hey, look! It’s a shrunken head!”

“Don’t be stupid, that’s not what it is—“

The sound of raucous laughter and shouting drifts in through a half-open window; Kuroko recognizes them, sort of: Koganei’s excited yelling, Izuki’s strange remarks, the schoolteachers’ (mostly Hyuuga’s) exasperated scolding. They don’t always notice Kuroko, but when they do he usually gets a fill of the week’s schoolyard gossip, and concerned queries from Riko over whether or not he _really_ should be at home all the time. Mayuzumi had told him to pay it no attention, of course, but…

“They seem excited,” he murmurs, taking another sip of the tea. Kagami hangs his mittens back on the wall, but there is a sort of stormy look to his face that Kuroko finds familiar. “Are they mean to you?”

“It’s not that,” Kagami mutters. He glances at the table, frowning. “I live…on Light Street, near the mayor’s.”

“So Kagami-kun is a rich kid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean,” Kuroko slides off the chair, carefully putting on the coat. It’s much too large for him, but it is warm. He slips the bottle out of his pocket and deposits it inside one of the much bigger ones. “Then why do you stay here?”

“My dad…” Kagami looks out the window, his gaze softening. “He goes fishing sometimes. He keeps his stuff here, and I just…come here sometimes.”

“Is he fishing now?”

“He’s been gone for six months.”

 

 

 

_“I’ll be gone for a while, Taiga.”_

It had been a fishing trip his father told him about, and then he’d been left in a too large house in a strange, distant place. Kagami’s father had grown up here, as had his father before him, but Kagami had been born in the city, far away to the south. He hated the chill of the barren plains, the snow that never seemed to end, and the other children who seemed almost afraid of him, sometimes.

(He had not known about the sleepwalking either, and even if he had…)

There was a private court in his backyard to entertain him, and limited hours on the Internet (Middle-of-Nowhere had a fluctuating issue with bandwidth that came up most often during heavy snow, though perhaps it was the concentration of curious magic that resided in town that did it). Occasionally he would see the faces of others through the fence: the cat-faced kid who always seemed excited about something or another, the quiet kid tagging along beside him; even one of the schoolteachers had yelled something at him from the other side once, but Kagami had ignored him.

The only places he frequented in town were the tiny supermarket and the bakery, and his father’s hut near the sea. The tall man who owned the bakery mostly ignored him, but his assistant had seemed to take a liking to him, sneaking him pastries every now and then. Tatsuya would come over sometimes and play with him, but he was busy, and away from the bakery on business more often than not.

(“If you go down to the sea,” he’d said, one day, “Maybe you’ll be able to see your father’s ship.”)

The villagers talked about a river in the sea, but all Kagami could see was the vast greyness of the northern sea, stretched out forever beyond his gaze. Occasionally he saw small fishing boats depart from the village and the ports beyond their own, but they were so far away he could not tell who they belonged to. The fish, too, all seemed to ignore his increasingly agitated pleas. Perhaps at this point, the Piyo-Piyo River really did not exist anymore.

In the end, he had resorted to other measures.

 

 

 

“Please don’t tell me you brought something weird home again.”

“It’s just a bottle,” Kuroko says. He fishes it out of the overlarge jacket—Kagami had told him to keep it, he had others, something like that—and shows it to Mayuzumi. “The lid’s on too tight.”

“Nice to know I’m just a glorified bottle opener,” Mayuzumi replies, but he pops the cap open anyway. “Where did you even get this?”

“I went to the beach.”

Kuroko takes the bottle back as Mayuzumi turns back to his typing, shaking the bottle until a rolled-up slip of paper falls onto his palm. He unrolls it, and starts to read.

_“How are you?”_

He reads this in his mother’s voice: soothing, gentle, and somehow it seems _real_ , the vibrations of her words echoing around him.

_“I miss you. Do you miss me? We’re all doing fine.”_

At this, Mayuzumi turns around, the expression on his face unreadable. He reaches for the letter, but Kuroko shies away, continuing on.

_“I miss you so much. Remember the song we used to sing? I’ll sing it for you now.”_

Kuroko holds the bottle up to his ear, listening to the sound of the sea; the teachers in the city had taught him this was just the blood circulating inside his head, but he hears—

_“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”_

Kuroko sits there, thinking about his house: the warmth of the fireplace in his old apartment, his father on the piano, the off-key interruptions of his grandmother at the third stanza. It seems a long time ago, he thinks—before the troubles had begun and the subsequent decision to send him off to relatives for a while. If he closes his eyes, he could still picture everyone there—among the scent of Christmas spices permeating the room, a kettle of tea whistling away softly on the stovetop.

“Did your mom write this?” Mayuzumi asks, after the song ends. His eyes are still fixed on the sheet of paper. There is no name up top, nor after; judging by the salt clinging to it, perhaps some of the sea had seeped inside.

“Yeah,” Kuroko says, looking down. The handwriting is unmistakable. “My birthday isn’t until January, though. Guess the fish delivered early.”

Mayuzumi looks back at his draft and mutters, “Fish don’t have any sense of time.”

“Yeah.”

 

 

 

Kuroko carries the bottle with him the next day, and the next. Sometimes he wears his jacket—Kagami’s jacket—but the temperature had fluctuated so much in a week he finally concedes to bringing around one of Mayuzumi’s old bags to store it in when it’s too hot to wear it.

“Hey! Kuroko!”

He looks up, seeing two figures trudging up in the snow towards him. Takao is his familiar self, waving at him heartily, but Kuroko is surprised to see one of the teachers with him. “Aida-san?”

“You’re a hard one to find,” Riko says, bending down. “Say, Kuroko, how would you like a tour of the school today?”

“Eh?”

“Don’t tell Mayuzumi,” Takao says, winking.

 

 

 

“Hey, Teppei, did you see one of the kids dropping this?”

Kiyoshi turns from his painting, focusing on the bottle in Riko’s hands. “Hm? No, I don’t think so. Did you ask Hyuuga?”

“He’s already gone home,” Riko says, frowning. She turns the bottle in her hand; it had been dirty once, she could tell, but someone had scrubbed it clean thoroughly after. “He has to help his brother today, or…oh, I guess I’ll just toss it, it looks like trash.”

“Looks like there’s something inside, though,” Kiyoshi says, pointing. “Maybe it got washed up. You know, it’s been a while since anyone’s gotten a message, but…”

“Who’s there?”

Riko looks out the window, but there is nobody on the street. The snow-lined path is muddled with hundreds of footsteps big and small, and she could hear no sound of laughing children. Across the street, she could see Murasakibara carefully placing freshly-baked loaves of bread in the window display; the door of the toy shop two stores down swings open, and Takao walks out with two bags, humming as he goes.

Kiyoshi comes to stand beside her. “Do you think it might be Kuroko’s?”

“That could explain it.”

It would explain a lot, Riko thinks as she flops down on her bed later that night, listening to the howling of the wind outside. Most of what the villagers know (which is admittedly not much) about Kuroko come from Takao’s mouth (“Too loud,” Miyaji had grumbled the other day as he dropped off mail for her father. “Though he’s been less annoying lately, spends his time goofing off in that toy shop.”) Sometimes she sees him come to town with Mayuzumi on Tuesdays, but she always loses track of them by the time the market is over.

“Wonder what this is…”

She shakes the bottle, letting the piece of paper slide down to her lap. Riko unfurls the worn letter and starts to read.

The handwriting looks familiar, somehow.

“…Mom?”

_“How are you?”_

_“I miss you. Do you miss me? We’re all doing fine.”_

There’s a soft knock on her door, but she does not answer as she brings the bottle up to her ear, listening intently. Her mother had been absent for nearly a decade now, separated by oceans and continents, despite the emails coming through from time to time. But Riko would know her voice anywhere, on a page or in a melody.

_“I miss you so much. Remember the song we used to sing? I’ll sing it for you now.”_

Her door creaks open as the song starts, the lullaby filling the room with her mother’s voice.

_“Snow and hail are falling thickly, steadily and piling up…”_

“Riko?”

She looks up at Kagetora blinking at her, indicating at the bottle in her hands. The expression on his face is unreadable. “What in the world…”

Riko smiles, holding the bottle out to him. “Just listen, dad.”

 

 

 

Midorima finds the bottle jammed into his mailbox the next morning, the light dusting of snow layered atop it confirming his suspicions that it was probably the cheeky postman’s fault. “Takao…”

But Takao would not be there that day; he’d told Midorima he would be busy sorting presents at the office, and with the amount going in and out, it would only be natural he would not be able to make it. Besides, he himself had gotten a peculiar request from the letter Takao had brought. Years and years of waiting, and yet the solution had been clear as day.

His phone, creaky, unconnected thing it is, rings.

“Hello?”

“Midorima Shintarou?”

The voice is unfamiliar, but almost commanding in a reassuring sort of way. Midorima sits back down, placing the bottle beside the radio. “Are you Akashi?”

“Yes. I’m just calling to thank you for taking up my offer, Midorima-san.” A pause. “We need all the help we can get during this time of the year.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have the seeds?”

Midorima had long since forgotten how he’d come by them—perhaps he’d found them in a garden somewhere, or he had traded for them like they did in the old days. Still, he thinks, as he runs one dried seed through his fingers, he wonders how much it would’ve cost. He has never seen the person who grew the little hats he needed for his dolls, the patchwork jackets for the stuffed animals; Takao had mentioned something about it, but his attention had been elsewhere. “I do.”

“Mayuzumi would be over later today to help you, then. I hope to see the results soon.”

After he puts down the phone, Midorima realizes the cap has somehow unscrewed itself, and that there’s most definitely something inside. And outside—he looks up, pursing his lips, but the shadow is gone.

Perhaps it had been nothing.

“Hm?”

Midorima dumps the letter out onto the table, a yellowing, dog-eared page, and his eyes widen as he picks it up.

_“How are you?”_

His sister would be nearing a hundred now, or more likely long dead—even then, he still recognizes her tiny, loopy writing, the way the characters curve under her hand. In the sixties Midorima had gotten word that she’d still been alive then. But wherever she was, she had moved far, far away from the village where he’d been left behind.

Now, he’s received another letter.

_“I miss you, do you miss me?”_

There had been a song popular shortly after the war ended, Midorima recalls. He’d been lying in the hospital, waiting for the surgery that would never come. There had been a basket of fruit for the officers in the room next door, big red apples and oranges; fruit prices had been terribly high then, and he remembers staring at it longingly as he listened to the static.

_“Bringing the red apple to my lips, staring at the blue sky in silence…”_

“The apple says nothing, but I understand how the apple feels…”

Then the bottle slips through his fingers, rolling onto the pile of cotton fluff beneath his feet. Midorima looks down, dazed, at his unfinished sewing. He slips the piece of paper back inside, and, realizing what had just happened, reaches for the phone again, this time his fingers shaking more than usual.

 

 

 

“Oi, Kuroko!”

“Who’s that?” Kagami asks, a little nervously. Kuroko shakes his head, keeping his own fishing rod steady.

They are on the rocks again, and though the sound is far off yet Kuroko could tell Takao sounds a little more excited than usual. He’d not even been gone that long—but now he wonders if Mayuzumi had been told about his school adventures, if the postman is here to pull him into another mess. Not that he’s had _that_ many. “It’s okay.”

“Let’s just keep fishing then,” Kagami says. He stares intently at the water, almost too intently. “You know, it’s kind of stupid, but I used to throw messages into the sea.”

“Like, bottled messages?”

“Yeah. I mean, I know they won’t get to my dad, he’s so far away…” He pauses, then looks up. “Probably. The fish don’t give a shit.”

Kuroko feels a gentle tug on his line. “Is that so.”

He pulls, gasping as the tug increases sharply; Kagami throws his own aside, grabbing onto Kuroko’s hand. Together they pull, hard, and Kuroko can feel his knees scraping against the jagged rocks. He’d have a dressing down to look forward to later, but for now, there’s a feeling he’s known this grip somewhere before—

“Damn, it’s gone.”

“Kagami-kun,” he says, plopping back down. Kagami’s jacket had proved a better insulant than he’d expected. “Have you been following me?”

“W-what?”

“The first day I came here,” Kuroko replies, drawing the line back in. “I fell into a hole.”

“…What does that have to do with anything.”

Kuroko looks into the water. “When you pulled with me, I felt the same sort of _thing_ back there. You followed Koganei-kun there, didn’t you? Or—”

Another wave crashes on the rocks, a little too close for comfort now. Out of the corner of his eye, Kuroko can see two people walking down the beach towards them. Kagami, for his part, furrows his brows in a way the younger boy’s come to know as a conflicted gesture.

“…I don’t know how I ended up there.” He looks down at his hands, already rough and calloused. There are scars there, ones that Kuroko had seen before, and ones he hadn’t. “I think I was asleep. I wasn’t tryna hurt him or anything, I just…”

“You just wanted to play?”

“Did someone say play?” Takao pipes up from behind. Kagami whips his head up, staring at him suspiciously; Kuroko shakes his head and puts a hand on his lap. _It’s okay_. “Man, I didn’t think you’d actually end up coming here. Ah, this must be Kagami, right?”

“Who…?”

“I’ve got mail for you!”

Kuroko stares at the bottle in his hand, then back at Kagami, whose own eyes are wide as he hesitates, then snatches the object out of Takao’s fingers. “Isn’t that—“

“Well, I don’t know much about how this stuff works, but it’s been making the rounds in town,” Takao says. “You know—“

“I don’t know,” Kagami says, much too quickly.

“Okay, so maybe he doesn’t,” Mayuzumi finally says, stepping in. “But this is ridiculous. You really had no idea what kind of paper you wrote this letter on?”

Kuroko looks up. “Was it one of the seeds?”

“I don’t know what you’re all talking about,” Kagami says stubbornly, looking away. Mayuzumi nods, pursing his lips. “It was just a piece of paper I found on my dad’s desk. How was I supposed to know something was going to happen? …What happened?”

Takao made a face. “About that…”

“Taiga!”

“…Tatsuya?”

Kuroko hops off the rocks, jumping at the freezing water that nipped at his feet. The man walking up to them looks unfamiliar, but Kuroko could smell, between the scents of salt water and cold air, a pleasant and familiar whiff of freshly-baked bread coming from the bag he holds. Takao whistles. “Ah, you must be the guy Tall Dude talks about.”

Mayuzumi stares at him, confused. “Tall Dude? The baker?”

Tatsuya completely ignores them. “What are you doing here? You’ll get sick!”

“But how did you—“

“Look.”

He searches through the bag, pulling out a bottle—then another, then another. Mayuzumi makes to say something, but Takao steps on his foot before he could do so, shooting him another look: _wait, I wanna see this_. Kagami, for his part, opens his mouth wide. “I thought…they all got lost.”

“Not all of them,” Tatsuya says, gently. “I’m sorry I was away for so long—but you know where I got these from, right?“

Kagami’s eyes open wide. “Dad’s back?”

 

 

 

“Okay, I think that’s quite enough weird friends for you.”

“Don’t think that’s how you should raise a kid,” Takao says, ruffling Kuroko’s hair. “See? I mean, I didn’t think there was another halfling in town, but I guess I was wrong.”

Kuroko looks at the ground as they walk, at the light footprints dotting the snow. “So it wasn’t real?”

“What wasn’t real?”

“The letter.”

“It was real,” Mayuzumi says, not looking back. He pulls Kuroko along, their footsteps falling in place. They walk past the toy store, the grocery store, the school. “All the letters that got lost along the way, that was what it showed you.”

“Magic, man,” Takao mutters, shaking his head. “Weird.”

When they get to the bakery, Kuroko stops, looking into the glass window once more. He sees Kagami there, holding the hand of a taller man, their backs to them. Murasakibara looks up at the three outside, shrugs, and moves on to serve the other customers, but the other man, the one who had come up to them, gives Kuroko a smile.

Kagami looks back, startled, and after a moment, waves.

“Well,” Mayuzumi murmurs. “That’s that, then.”

They part with Takao at the post office—Kuroko could see packages stacked high to the windows, and hear Miyaji’s heated yelling coming through the doors again—but this time Mayuzumi turns left at the edge of the village, towards the fields. “Where are we going?”

“Checking on the thing you planted,” Mayuzumi replies. “It’s almost Christmas—weird shit’s bound to happen.”

As they get nearer, it becomes apparent that there _is_ something poking out of the ground where the dirt had been turned. Kuroko shakes off Mayuzumi’s grip, and runs towards it, squatting down in the clearing where there is no snow. A single flower-bud, pale blue beneath the moonlight, bends slightly in the wind.

Kuroko looks up at the snow fairy. “Does it do anything?”

“How would I know?” And then, sighing, he bends down to look at it. “With your luck, it’ll probably turn into a man-eating flower by tomorrow.”

Kuroko thinks long and hard about this, cupping his chin in his hands. “Cool.”

“ _Not_ cool,” Mayuzumi groans. Then, whispering at the plant, “… _Please_ don’t turn into a man-eating flower.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song in Riko's letter is "Yuki", a traditional lullaby.
> 
> The song in Midorima's letter is "Ringo no Uta", a popular song - originally written for the war - from the movie _Soyokaze_ (1945).
> 
> Last chapter should be up by Christmas, which is the plan, but if not (read: if finals keep destroying me) then definitely before NYE.


	5. メリークリスマス

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mayuzumi takes a deep breath, looks around at everyone in the room, and sees that the only expressions he’s getting are those of the completely lost. “Look, it’s not like I want to give a shit about this either, okay? But someone’s—someone’s stolen Christmas.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> merry christmas y'all

“Fuck,” Mayuzumi says.

Otsubo looks up from re-wrapping a damaged shoebox, frowning. “Hey, Kuroko-kun is listening.”

“I don’t mind.” Kuroko scuttles over to where Mayuzumi is reading a letter, and in some amazing feat of kid-gymnastics manages to wrestle it out of his hand. “I can’t read this. There’s too many kanji.”

“Oi, that’s not yours!” Miyaji growls, dropping his own pile of papers onto the desk. “That’s a felony—“

“It’s for Akashi,” Mayuzumi retorts, snatching it back. “And it’s a fucking _war declaration_.”

“…What?”

 

 

 

Miles away, Akashi sneezes.

“…Sei-chan?” Mibuchi gasps in horror, putting down his cup of tea. “Are you ill? You never sneeze, are you—“

“I’m fine,” Akashi says. He looks at his own cup, brows furrowed. “There are some…unexpected visitors.”

“Chi-chan?”

“No.” He leans back, looking out the window at the vast expanses below. Two figures, little more than black dots on the horizon, are walking towards the tower. In the distance, he hears alarm bells going off, all the way from the bottom floors. Akashi sighs; in the past, when there had been no treaties, he would not have even bothered to entertain them. “Annoyances of a different sort.”

 

 

 

Kasamatsu stares at the letter on his desk as if it were a bomb. “A _war_ declaration? This is a little out of my jurisdiction, you know—”

“I’m not asking you to take up arms or whatever.“

“—also, opening someone else’s letters _is_ a violation of the law, so I’ll have to—“

“Are you even _listening_ to me?”

“Whoa, when did he start caring so much about this place,” Miyaji says offhandedly to the other officers, who only shrug as they watch the debacle unfold. “I mean, have any of you _seen_ him before?”

Moriyama scratches his head. “Um, no? Am I supposed to have?”

“I don’t understand,” Kuroko mutters in the background, standing next to Takao. “Why are they arguing about Christmas?”

“Hey, I’ve been here about as long as you have,” Takao replies, then looks over at the others. “Oi, _why_ are y’all arguing about Christmas? Mayuzumi?”

Mayuzumi takes a deep breath, looks around at everyone in the room, and sees that the only expressions he’s getting are those of the completely lost. “Look, it’s not like I want to give a shit about this either, okay? But someone’s—someone’s _stolen_ Christmas.”

Kasamatsu drops his coffee.

“ _What_.”

 

 

 

“The Bureau of Holidays,” Akashi murmurs thoughtfully, settling back into his seat. He looks over at his two new guests carefully, then at Mibuchi, Hayama, and Nebuya hiding very badly behind the bathroom door. “Don’t you think you should’ve called before coming?”

The two inspectors look at each other. Then, one of them speaks carefully. “We didn’t know if you would take the call, sir.”

“How is he so _calm_ about this,” Mibuchi groans, tilting his face back. “Who would do such a thing? Who would steal a _holiday_?”

“Reo-nee, you’re sitting on my foot.”

Akashi sighs. “Tell me the details about Christmas.”

“Yes,” the taller one says. He extracts an important-looking file from his briefcase and starts to read. “After the war between the humans and faeries in 336, there was a truce and subsequent feast-date set—“

“Not that,” the shorter one growls. “The market statistics, you idiot!”

“Oh! Well—sir, the projected spending is supposed to be six trillion this year. Losing Christmas would be nothing short of devastating on the world economy and for your own business, as you know. A state of international emergency. That’s why it is of utmost importance to us to apprehend the thief—specifically, the Bureau wants to recruit you on our mission to retrieve it.”

“Is he serious,” Nebuya whispers, but Mibuchi could only give him a helpless shake of the head. “What even _happens_ if you steal a holiday? Christmas is tomorrow!”

“Will we just all black out at the stroke of midnight?” Hayama shoots back excitedly. “Boy, I mean, if that—“

“Shhh!”

“I see,” Akashi says finally, and there’s a dangerous look in his eyes that doesn’t quite match the cheery voice he’s putting on. “May I ask, then, how did this theft take place? Is the Bureau so inept that no security measures were taken? Did, pray tell, _anything else_ get stolen?”

The shorter one visibly fidgets. “Well, no, but…”

“Uh oh,” Mibuchi said, with a sorrowful sigh. “He’s _really_ pissed now.”

 

 

 

“Oi!” Mayuzumi yelled using his loudest voice, which isn’t actually very loud at all, “You asshole, I know you’re up there—“

“Can you please try to—ouch!— _not_ sit on my neck,” Takao groans, shifting his position slightly. He’d never really taken anyone on his back before while flying, and certainly not a grumpy, agitated snow fairy who had decided he wanted to yell at the clouds, or something. “Also, I don’t think the cloud wants to talk.”

“I’m not talking to the clouds.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Who’s down there?”

Takao blinks as a figure descends from the clouds in fashionable dress (Takao doesn’t think he’s _ever_ seen someone pull off a reaper’s robes so beautifully), blinking his golden eyes at the two who look completely out of place. “Eh? Aren’t you that guy…“

“Don’t tell me Nijimura decided to keep you,” Mayuzumi groans as Kise flits nearer to them, a hand over his mouth. “Where is he, anyway?”

“Why? Nijimuracchi told me I shouldn’t let anyone in—“

“Look, it’s about Haizaki.”

“Who the hell’s Haizaki,” Takao asks, but he sees a shadow cross Kise’s pretty face and instantly realizes something amiss. “Oh, Mayuzumi, don’t tell me…“

“Let me go get Nijimuracchi real quick,” Kise says, with an exaggerated sigh. He puts his hands on his hips. “Aish, is this the kind of news you always bring? I was wondering what all the noise was out there…”

Mayuzumi rolls his eyes. “Just get on with it, before Akashi decides destroying the world is worth his trouble.”

 

 

 

Kasamatsu throws the last hunting rifle at Otsubo, who, after weighing it in his hands, still looks as perplexed as the rest of the adults in the room. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Considering we’ve never had a village-wide crisis in a century, I’d wager it’s better than nothing,” Kasamatsu replies, but even he looks doubtful at the shitty arsenal the rest of the officers and several of the villagers are holding. Strictly speaking, Middle-of-Nowhere _is_ in a treaty zone, a demilitarized middle ground; in reality, with the Santa Claus Corporation just a few miles down the road, there’d always been an invisible threat looming over their heads. “This is ridiculous.”

“Hey, where did that kid go?” Kimura says, bringing all their attention towards the half-open door. “Who—“

“God _damnit_ ,” Kasamatsu mutters, throwing on his coat again. “Wait here.”

 

 

 

Kuroko trudges through the snow towards the fields, his legs feeling more tired than ever. But he’d seen, when the adults were talking, something in the fire that day, and his gut had told him this was the place to go.

Mayuzumi and Takao had forgotten about him again, perhaps, off doing some sort of important adult mission. It’s a little hard navigating the wide expanse of the tundra without his guardian, but Kuroko can already feel something different in the air as he approaches.

The ground vibrates.

He stops.

There’s something—something big—coming towards him. As little as he knows about physics, Kuroko’s lived here long enough to figure out that things _usually_ don’t vibrate so much on top of the snow, and that whatever’s coming is probably a result of some sort of fucked up magic that he seems to attract.

He takes a step back.

_(Please don’t let it be a man-eating flower.)_

But what pops out of the snow a few feet before him is nothing more than a dog which, after shaking off all the dirt and snow clinging to its fur, is really quite small. Kuroko stares at it, and it barks once.

“Huh…?”

There’s something about it that looks familiar, he thinks, after deciding it isn’t a man-eating dog after all. The creature circles around him curiously, then comes up to bump his leg. Kuroko scoops the dog up in his skinny arms; it’s surprisingly heavy for how it looks, but its fur is warm and comforting and he does not want to put it down at all.

“Oi, Kuroko!”

“…Kasamatsu-san?”

“What in the world,” Kasamatsu says, jogging up towards him, his eyes fixed on the dog in Kuroko’s arms. “Where’d you get that?”

“I just found him here,” Kuroko says. He looks towards the fields, and realizes he hasn’t checked on his plant yet. The dog licks his chin, and he looks down, startled. “I need to look for something.“

“You know it’s dangerous out here,” Kasamatsu begins, but then a shadow passes over them, and he stops. “Shit, Kuroko, get over here—“

“Oh, is that his name?”

Kuroko turns around, but between Kasamatsu’s panicked yell and the angry barking of the dog in his arms all he feels is a sharp pain, and then nothing.

 

 

 

“Where the fuck did he go,” Mayuzumi growls, kicking open the door. “Oi, Kuroko—“

Midorima looks up indignantly, putting down his knitting. “Can you tell me why in the _world_ are you trying to destroy my store?”

“Shin-chan, have you seen Kuroko?” Takao pipes up, his worried face appearing behind Mayuzumi’s shoulder. “I can’t find him, and the people at the station say Kasamatsu’s gone missing too, and—“

The phone rings.

“Better be good news,” Mayuzumi mutters, and grabs the phone before Midorima could reach for it. “Akashi?”

“…I was expecting someone entirely different, Chihiro.”

“Tough luck,” Mayuzumi says. “Anyway, Nijimura’s been informed already, so if this is about—“

“Kuroko’s been taken.”

“…What.”

There is a sigh at the other end of the line, intermingled with audible bits of annoyance and what Mayuzumi can tell is a sign that things are still going south, quick. “It seems that I’ve overlooked a few too many things this season. I’ll deal with it—“

“You’re not going to destroy this place again, are you.”

Mayuzumi can feel Takao and Midorima’s gazes burning holes into his back, but at this point he is beyond caring. Kuroko disappearing had not been planned, and if only he’d…

“That was…a mistake from long ago.”

“Well, if you aren’t…”

“Am I sensing encouragement, Chihiro?”

“Fuck no.” Mayuzumi takes a deep breath. “Well, _I_ won’t be able to stop you, but maybe…try not to, if you can.”

The phone clicks. Takao is the first to speak, after the strange silence for a few moments after. “I…think we need some explanations?”

“Nothing to explain,” Mayuzumi says. Then, “You know where Christmas comes from?”

“Not like what the books say, huh?”

Then Midorima speaks up, suddenly. “There was a war a few hundred years back, between the humans who settled here and the non-humans. There was a treaty come winter, declarations and agreements afterwards, exchanging presents…the rest is history, more or less. It’s a tradition that’s simply been co-opted by whatever the flavor of the time is by people who don’t know the truth.”

Mayuzumi raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“The village annals make interesting reading,” Midorima retorts, adjusting his glasses. “Not that most people read it.”

“Wow, Shin-chan,” Takao says in awe. “That sounds….like the most amazingly boring thing to read. But what does that have to do with stealing Christmas?”

“Do you know just _how_ much Akashi makes in a year?” Mayuzumi asks. “Loaning out the rights to use his image and the Christmas brand, that is. For the past like what, seven hundred years? It’s fucking nuts.”

“I still can’t believe this is happening,” Midorima mutters. “So much money, going to god knows where—“

“Oi, aren’t you guys forgetting something important?” Takao cuts in, frowning. “Kuroko-kun’s…”

“That’s what we’re going to do now,” Mayuzumi says, his face darkening. “Unless someone else gets there first.”

 

 

 

Kuroko wakes up to a throbbing forehead, his vision still blurry as he tries to sit up in the snow. His hands are tied together, as are his legs, and tightly.

“Mmgh…”

“Kuroko? You awake?”

“Kasamatsu-san?”

“Up here.”

He looks up to see Kasamatsu hanging upside-down in the air, tied to a large branch above them. Kuroko almost starts to laugh, but as comical as the situation is, the grave look on Kasamatsu’s face tells him it’s not the time for such a display. “What happened?”

“I don’t remember,” Kasamatsu says, frowning. “I thought I’d landed a punch, but then there wasn’t anything…are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so,” Kuroko replies. Then his eyes widen. “Wait, where’s the dog—“

“You’re both awake, huh.”

He whips his head back, staring at the grey-haired man sauntering towards them from behind the shed next to the tree. There’s something dangerous about him Kuroko can’t place, but all he needs as a warning is Kasamatsu growling behind him and the agitated barking in the distance.

The man looks down on him, and Kuroko realizes he’s giving off a similar sort of vibe as Aomine and Nijimura had. “Are you…”

“That fucker Aomine talks about you, you know.”

“What the hell do you want with us,” Kasamatsu asks, but the man ignores him. “Hey! I’m talking to you, punk—“

“Shut up,” the man says, raising a fist. “I’m not talking to you.”

“Don’t hit him,” Kuroko says in a small voice, shutting his eyes as the man inches closer to him. “Why do you want me here?”

“I was told you’re quite special,” the man says, prodding Kuroko with a foot. “But I don’t see anything that tells me that, eh? What are you? Half-elf? Ghost?”

Kuroko frowns. “I’m human.”

“Tch.” He reaches down, easily picking Kuroko up by the collar. Despite Kasamatsu’s loud protests behind them, the man stares at him with sharp eyes. “Well, you better hope that guy Akashi’s fucking gives enough of a shit about you then.”

“Chihiro does care very much for the boy, Haizaki,” comes a quiet voice not far away. Haizaki whirls around, and sees Akashi standing there alone, his arms folded. Despite never having seen him before, Kuroko immediately knows who this is—there’s no mistaking the brilliant red cape billowing around him, the funny hat on top of his head. But all of the depictions of Santa Claus back in the various malls of the city had never prepared him for this.

Way behind him, behind several mounds of snow, Kuroko can sense other people hiding. Akashi takes a step forward, a small but menacing gesture even coming from someone of his size. “Drop the kid.”

“Why the hell would I?” Haizaki growls. “I have everything I need already. What’s stopping me from killing him?”

“You may have stolen Christmas,” Akashi says, holding up something shiny in his hand, “But you don’t have the key to open it, do you?”

“What the ever-loving hell is going on,” Kasamatsu murmurs. Kuroko looks up at him and shrugs.

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices something move in the forest: Mayuzumi and Takao are hidden behind one of the other trees, staring at him.

“I didn’t know you had a heart so big,” Haizaki says, taking a step forward even as Kuroko struggles beneath his fingers. “So, the boy for the key, is it?”

 

 

“Mayuzumi,” Takao whispers urgently, trying to find the best position to crouch in, “What does Christmas look like?”

“It looks different depending on who’s holding it,” Mayuzumi says, squinting. “But there’s always a lock on it.”

“That’s not helping,” Takao groans, peering at the pocket knife Midorima had given him earlier. His lucky item of the day, apparently. “Look, if Akashi can’t convince him, I’ll try to get Kasamatsu down, you try to get the kid.”

 

 

Akashi smiles, but it is not the sort of smile Kuroko usually associates with Santa Claus. In fact, he thinks, he’s reminded of the rakshasas he’d seen in temples before. “Yes.”

Haizaki spits on the ground. “Cut it out, will you? There’s no fucking way you’re letting this go so easily.”

“Do I look like one to break my word?”

He holds out the key, shrugging. “Perhaps I’ve been thinking about retiring. Of course, it’s a prestigious position, as you know—you do know, or you wouldn’t have risked so much to steal it. If you think you’re up to the task, I would wholeheartedly welcome a change of leadership.”

Haizaki stares at his hand, hesitating; in the next second he snatches the key from Akashi’s hand, and shoves Kuroko at him. Then, before anyone could do anything, he is gone.

“Okay,” Kasamatsu says, after a brief silence. “Now that we’ll all inevitably have a very bad day tomorrow, can somebody let me down?”

Kuroko looks up at Akashi, whose expression is unreadable as ever. “I…”

“It’s fine,” Akashi says, shrugging. “I’ve asked—“

“Not fine,” Mayuzumi says, emerging from the forest. “You know I can see your 214,200 invisible reindeer grazing in the pasture behind, right? Please don’t fuck up my fields again.”

“I’m not going to war, Chihiro.” He tilts his head; some of the heat’s left his face, Mayuzumi can tell. “Nijimura-san said he will take care of it, and I trust him on that.”

“So it…this is it?”

There’s a bark, and Kuroko had hardly turned around before a blur of grey and white rams into him, sending both of them tumbling into the snow. Mayuzumi stares at the dog licking Kuroko’s face happily, its tail wagging at a rate of a mile a minute. “What the hell…?”

“Hey, it looks like Kuroko!” Takao exclaims as he comes over with Kasamatsu, finally unbound. “Don’t you think so? Look at its face—“

Akashi smiles, looking up at Mayuzumi. “I suppose this is the seed you told me about.”

Mayuzumi sighs, wringing his hands. “Well, at least one wish came true this year. What about all the presents, then? You’re really just gonna let it all go for now?”

“There’s a reason I brought my entire herd, you know.”

 

 

 

By the time Haizaki gets to the factory, he figures something is amiss.

“Where’s all the fucking reindeer…? The toys…?”

The corporate headquarters is empty as he walks in, his footsteps echoing through the long hallways and silent machines. It is as if all the elves and presents had simply vanished into thin air.

“ _Akashi…_ ”

He stomps out of the last room, throwing the key and chameleon wind-up toy into the soft new snow outside. There is nothing here at all, none of the glitz and glam of Christmas—it had been the real deal he had stolen, but Akashi had tricked him, somehow.

“Fucking hell…”

“Going somewhere?”

He freezes. Standing at the door, framed by the last rays of sunset, is someone he never wants to see again.

“Must be nice running off your job to mess around with things you shouldn’t, huh?”

“Um, Nijimura…”

“Do you know just _how_ much fucking trouble you’ve caused?”

(Later legends tell of a scream, long and frightful, that went on deep into the night, haunting a specific corner of the corporation headquarters that elves no longer dared to step in—but it is _only_ a legend, after all.)

 

 

 

“I never thought I would spend Christmas Eve like this,” Otsubo says. “I mean, we’ve delivered presents through the night before, but not like _this_.”

“Neither have I,” Miyaji says, wrapping his scarf tighter around his neck. “Man, this is sure something.”

The flying reindeer beneath him grunts.

Kuroko looks out of the sled at the frozen world below, the many golden specks of lights in the windows creating shapes that he’d never seen before. All around them there are reindeer prancing through the skies, and villagers sitting atop several of them, or in sleds, their laughter and talking filling the night with raucous noise. Akashi is in the front seat, one hand tightly gripping the reins, his other hand on Mayuzumi’s lap.

Mayuzumi turns around to look at him. “Oi, don’t lean out too much. You’ll fall off.”

“I’ve got him,” Takao says, gently pulling Kuroko back. Nigou barks once, though he is snugly fitted underneath his jacket. “Keep an eye on the presents, they’ll kill people if they fall out at this rate.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t mind that,” Mayuzumi says, but Akashi gives him a concerned look. “…I wouldn't mind that happening _to some people_.”

“Okay, serial killer.”

“Shut up, Takao.”

It would be a long night, Kuroko knows, but as he pulls the blankets over him and the brightly wrapped gifts underneath his feet there is so much energy dancing in the atmosphere around them. Nigou makes a small whining noise, bumping him on the shoulder, and he puts a hand over the puppy’s head. Takao looks at him and winks, putting a finger to his lips.

Despite the snow, the wind, the frozen skies, Kuroko feels warm inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the reindeer figure is from [this site](http://www.daclarke.org/Humour/santa.html).
> 
> i was not planning on a heartwarming ending at all but well here we are!! i hope y'all enjoyed this weird ride & hope everyone's having a great time!

**Author's Note:**

> this will be updated according to the solar terms (did you know today's the first day of winter?)... because i can't keep a schedule so i'll just let nature do it for me :') and yes, i have other things i need to update...orz  
> (feel free to guess what sorts of animals some of the characters are!)


End file.
